Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs

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"Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs presents a new theoretical and historical approach to Israeli and Palestinian literature, as well as to the contemporary system of world literature, one that accounts for the consequences of neoliberal globalization. Cohen Lustig proposes that until the neoliberal moment, socio-poetic form was defined by concepts of autonomy and temporality: in Western Europe autonomy is defined as a ready-made property of the individual subject; in Israel and Palestine, between the 1940s and the 1990s, autonomy was the ground for debate over collective political and aesthetic projects. In the global neoliberal period, after 1985 in Israel and the 1993 Oslo Accords in Palestine, when privatization escalated in the region, social life and literature begin to revolve around the experience of subjects for whom the world was no longer an object to be made but a text to be read. In this historical condition, Israeli and Palestinian literature narrated the political conditions of local life in a way that exceeded the nation state and questioned the coherence of private life. To see this transformation requires a new concept of global literature that can track the development of subjectivity and aesthetics through larger shifts in politics and economic production"--